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Adult Anxiety

Social anxiety in young adults moderates attentional modulation of neurocognitive responses to ambiguous emotional faces

(PS9-B46) Social Anxiety in Young Adults Moderates Attentional Modulation of Neurocognitive Responses to Ambiguous Emotional Faces

Saturday, November 19, 2022

1:30 PM – 2:30 PM EST

Location: Westside Ballroom, 5th Floor

Author(s)

Anne E. Werkheiser, B.A.

Graduate Student
Georgia State University
Atlanta, Georgia

Co-Author(s)

MF

Mary Fernandes, M.A.

PhD student
Georgia State University
Silver Spring, Maryland
ET

Erin B. Tone, Ph.D.

Professor and Director of Clinical Training
Georgia State University
Atlanta, Georgia

Findings from a recent meta-analysis (Chen, Van Den Bos, & Westenberg, 2020) suggest that people with high levels of social anxiety are prone to avoid looking at faces in naturalistic social situations, especially when those situations are anxiety-provoking. One function such avoidance may serve is regulating neurophysiological responses, indexed by such markers as attenuated pupillary dilation, that have been observed in anxious individuals in response to cues conveying information that is ambiguous or unpredictably linked to contingent outcomes (e.g., Browning et al., 2015). To test the hypothesis that visual avoidance of ambiguous cues would be associated with better-regulated neurophysiological responses, as indexed by smaller attenuation in pupillary dilation, among individuals with high social anxiety, we examined pupillary dilation during viewing of ambiguous faces that provided personalized evaluative feedback about 55 racially/ethnically diverse young adults’ performance on a difficult task. To increase the likelihood that we would be measuring responses to ambiguity rather than responses to threat, we used 10 and 20% morphs of neutral/happy faces (all of equivalent luminosity) and, in line with findings from Fernandes (2018) that blunted responses occur quickly after cue presentation and then diminish, we focused on dilation over the first two seconds following the presentation of each face. Duration of fixation time on faces served as a measure of attention. Huynh-Feldt corrected (see Abdi, 2010) results of a two-way repeated measures ANOVA indicated a significant and large main effect of dilation measurement time point, F(2.385, 44.509) = 32.519, p < .01; ƞ² = .59, that was qualified by a significant, medium-sized interaction among dilation time point, anxiety level, and attention to face cues (high/low), F(2.385, 44.509) = 3.21, p = .04; ƞ² = .12. The pattern of findings, as illustrated in Figure 1, suggests that differences between high and low SA individuals emerge only in the context of high attention to feedback from ambiguous faces. Unexpectedly, however, differences were driven by a lack of attenuation among low anxious, high attenders; low attenders, regardless of anxiety status, all showed similarly attenuated dilation. These findings suggest that visual avoidance of ambiguous emotional faces does not regulate at least one marker of anxiety-related neurophysiological responding; instead, they raise the possibility that when anxious individuals attend to ambiguous cues, they may fail to engage normative regulatory responses. We discuss implications these findings have for improving responses to exposure interventions for social anxiety.